For those of you not keeping score at home, at the end of Smallville's seventh season, Lex Luthor disappeared when the Fortress of Solitude collapsed on him. Although he was presumed dead, it was later revealed that he was alive, though not well, will all sorts of mechanical contraptions keeping him alive. Green Arrow finally had enough and killed Lex, a decision which continued to haunt him. After that various Lex clones were spotted and for the most part destroyed with the last of the clones turning into Connor Kent AKA Superboy. We know Lex is set to appear in the series finale, poised to become Superman's greatest foe, but now we have a clue as to the method of his return. It looks like maybe Ollie didn't kill him after all, which would be nice since it would make Green Arrow no longer a murderer. Whatever is the method of his return, you've got to admit, its a pretty miraculous recovery.

20 April 2011

Praise be to Heat Vision for giving the scoop on the upcoming animated Batman: Year One voice cast along with a couple of images from the movie. This pics are gorgeous. I think the simple designs are going to look fantastic when we see them in motion.

As for the cast, Ben McKenzie from the OC is Batman, Malcolm in the Middle's dad is Gordon. Starbuck is Sarah Essen and Dollhouse is Catwoman (as some had predicted from an enigmatic tweet a few weeks back). Although Catwoman didn't have a lot to do in the Year One comic, additional material was written for a Catwoman short that will accompany the movie and I assume Faith with do the voice for that as well. This looks like yet another winner from DC.

June of 1992 brought the highly anticipated sequel to 1989's blockbuster Batman. In Batman Returns, Bats faced off against not one, but two (arguably three) villains, a trend that would ever plague comic book movies to come. Nowadays its easy to forget how significant Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie was. Before that movie came out, the masses knew Batman from the 1960's Biff, Bam, Pow, TV show or from Super Friends. In the 80's comic book readers were treated to a Batman closer to his roots and redefined by such classics as The Dark Knight Returns. The 1989 film exposed general audiences to a Batman not rooted in camp, but a Dark Knight.

Unfortunately, in the 1992, Burton attempted to double down with a darker, grittier, more crazy, and less Happy Meal friendly Batman facing off against a grotesque imagining of the Penguin and an innuendo drenched Catwoman. The movie was a hit, earning over $160 million in the US on an $80 million budget, nevertheless, audience reaction caused the pendulum to swing in the Schumacher direction.

Just a few months later in September, Batman: The Animated Series would debut and Batman would be redefined for a generation. I hardly need to go into why this series was such a big deal, I will just say it spawned over 100 episodes of Batventures, and began the decade long presence of the DC animated universe.

Amazingly, a month after the debut of Batman's series, The X-Men got an animated series of their own. It too was a hit lasting five years and 76 episodes and beginning Marvel's own attempt at an established animated universes. Even more so than the Batman series, X-Men ambitiously adapted stories directly from the comics and won over a new crop of fans. So it was that two of the most influential superhero series debuted during the same fall season

Oh, and there was also a Human Target live action TV series in 1992. It lasted just 7 episodes because no one watched it.